


Rare Bird

by spqr



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: A/B/O, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Past Rape/Non-con, Porn with Feelings, Prostitution, Protective Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Slavery, Soft Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Trauma, every trope in the book, warlord geralt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:07:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23862034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Jaskier understood from a very young age that his life was not destined to be a happy one.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 93
Kudos: 3536





	Rare Bird

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [With a Conquering Air](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23273713) by [inexplicifics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inexplicifics/pseuds/inexplicifics). 



> i don’t even usually read a/b/o and now here i am writing 20k of it. quarantine really changes you.

Jaskier understood from a very young age that his life was not destined to be a happy one.

Certainly, at the age of fourteen, he knew. He had his first heat in the dead of winter, confused and alone, locked in a room in a deserted wing of the Lettenhove estate with no one to stoke the fire and no one to explain, through the sickly, shivering haze of neediness, what was happening to him. Two days spent curled on his side in sweaty bedclothes, freezing, aching and desperate for something he was barely old enough to understand—and when he emerged, it was to find that his family had been replaced by cruel marble statues, who would not speak to him at supper and would not abide his tagging along when they went out.

Even his mother, who was an omega herself, could not find space in her heart for such a pitiful thing as an omega son. Jaskier had known he was not particularly well-liked before, being too loud and too dramatic and too admiring of fine fabrics, but once puberty revealed him to be that most biologically useless of all creatures, who could neither bear children nor father them but only spread his legs once a season for the unlucky carrier of his mark, his family’s disdain increased tenfold. His father, in particular, took particular care to disabuse Jaskier of the notion that he was wanted; where in spite of his effeminate tendencies he might before have been married off to the daughter of a minor duke in exchange for a modest dowry, he was now nothing more than a tumor, an unseemly growth which Count de Lettenhove had to figure out some quiet and expedient way to remove.

Inquiries had been made upon birth as to the provenance of Jaskier’s soulmark; like other noble Redanian children, Jaskier had had his mark copied down faithfully by a scribe from Tretogor, tucked away in some dusty tome in the royal library for reference by the king’s council whenever Redania found itself in the position of having to negotiate a treaty. Jaskier’s mark had never been matched, not with a member of the Redanian noblesse and not with any foreign dignitaries; though, to be fair, that sort of match was exceedingly rare, with the only instance anyone had ever heard of being the marriage of Temerian princess to the king of the Korathi desert nomads.

It had never bothered Jaskier, knowing that he would find his mate outside the great banquet halls and lavish menageries of his youth. He’d liked the idea, even. But being marked for a king or a marchioness would have at least made him worth something, and Jaskier can’t help but think if he’d been worth something, he wouldn’t be where he is now, which is in the back of a slaver’s cart.

—

It’s been raining for a week, and the damp has seeped so deeply into Jaskier’s skin that when he runs his fingernails over his palms he comes up with bits of white flesh. He’d hoped that the frankly unsettling phenomenon might repeat itself with the old omega brand on the bottom of his right foot, or the fresher, still-smarting ‘FGV’ on the back of his left shoulder, but all the weather has done in that department is turn the angry red marks deep, frozen purple.

He’s not sure what’s the worst part of it all—the violent shivers racking his body, so reminiscent of how he spent his first heat, the dead-eyed, hopeless stares of the other slaves in the cart with him, one of whom is a girl who looks no older than twelve, or the fact that, when they’d finally caught up to him after his ill-advised mad dash through the ice-covered countryside, he’d had the brief thought that he was lucky they hadn’t hamstrung him like they’d done to that _fugitivus_ Nilfgaardian.

 _Lucky_. The word takes a long minute even to form in his brain, so sluggish has it been rendered by the cold and the hunger. A year ago, before he reached the age of majority and his father accepted a single gold coin from the local slaver on condition that his youngest son would never again darken his doorstep, ‘luck’ meant finding a particularly rare songbook at the traveling market, or having his mother grace him with a pained smile when she passed the garden and heard him strumming a tune she remembered from her childhood. Not being branded, instead of crippled. Oh, well, Jaskier supposes. At least he wasn’t married off to a dusty old duke four times his age, like the omega girl in the estate next door.

He laughs a little to himself. By the alarmed look the twelve-year-old girl gives him, he must sound unhinged—but then again, it’d be a tall order to sound any other way, seeing as they’re all on their way to be paraded about naked and sold to the highest bidder.

It’s not Jaskier’s first time at the Ban Gléann slave market, but it _is_ his first time since the White Wolf started conquering Kaedwen, methodically working his way down from the great citadel of Kaer Morhen in the north. He’s not sure quite where the White Wolf’s territory ends and the last strongholds of the king of Kaedwen begin, but then people aren’t exactly prone to offer news of the world’s events to slaves; those who aren’t interested in purchase or perusal usually just look the other way, uncomfortable with the vision of fellow humans so stripped of dignity. But Jaskier has overheard enough—the slavers don’t know that he used to be a noble, and so don’t know that he speaks nearly every language on the continent—so he’s heard the clashing rumors from north and south: that the White Wolf is a bloodthirsty warlord, a monster set loose from the halls of the witcher fortress to sow suffering and anguish throughout the realms of men; that he is a savior, a friend of the downtrodden and the oppressed, who leaves entire villages emancipated behind him, who requires no tithe and no fealty but rather leaves common folk to rule themselves.

There is no part of him that’s hoping the slave market will be gone when they arrive; no part of him that expects Ban Gléann has already fallen beneath the White Wolf’s chain-breaking sword. Jaskier learned very quickly that hope is as dangerous as it is pointless. But some piece of his heart must still be alive—it must be, for him to feel it fall like a pebble from a cliff when the caravan rattles beneath the archway of the city’s outer wall, and he sees the market is already in full swing.

Their cart lists to a stop behind a raised stage, and the slavers swing the door open. A year ago, Jaskier might have spat at them, but now he barely has the energy to muster a defiant stare; one of the slavers grabs him by the ear and hauls him out. “You’ll go for cheap,” he barks, shoving Jaskier toward a pile of mud and dung. “No one likes to keep a runner for long.”

Jaskier wishes he were a runner, at heart. He wishes he still had it in him to make a break for it again—he’d much rather go to his death under a sword, knowing he’d at least had the balls to try, than shuffle manacled and docile through whatever short and miserable period of his life still remains. But he’s so _tired_.

A worker from the auction house strips him naked, using a knife to tear through his sodden clothes, and checks the bottom of his foot before prodding him off to join a line of the other omegas.

The twelve-year-old isn’t with them, thank Melitele, but instead with a group of other children too young to have presented. Jaskier tries to give her an encouraging look, but his heart feels like a wet fish, dead and cold in his chest, so he’s not sure that he really manages. Her expression doesn’t change, either way. He recognizes that hollow-eyed stare, the way she must be retreating into her own mind in order to survive. He’s seen it enough on his own face, in tarnished looking-glasses in a dozen disreputable inns across the continent. Naked, covered in bruises, feeling the weight of bile at the bottom of his throat, everything still overly-crisp, overly-still in the way it is when he comes awake out of the haze of heat. It’s a look like a dead thing; a tree in the deepest night of winter, reduced to bones, nothing left to do but wait for daylight and the budding of leaves in a spring that may never come.

Jaskier never thought he’d see that expression on a child’s face. It’s so much worse than seeing it on his own.

The auction worker marches them out on stage with a cattle prod. Jaskier sees the leader of their slavers haggling with the auction master, probably trying to negotiate for a better cut, and he sees the crowd gathered out in front of the stage, the men in bespoke leather here to purchase and the dirt-streaked common folk here to ogle, sees the heave and roil of the rest of the market around them, the proud stone edifices of Ban Gléann crawling with people on staircases, on rooftops, going about their lives with little care for the pitiful creatures stripped of both clothes and personhood in their midst. He sees—with a pang of bitter, violent longing—a man in bright green livery dancing his way through the crowd with a lute and an upturned hat. But he hears only a dull, persistent buzzing, nearly identical to the feeling of the inexorable rain on his cold-numbed skin.

Jaskier drops his chin to his chest, too exhausted to hold up his head, and finds himself staring at the soulmark just below his frigid right nipple. The proud, snarling wolf, turned blue with the rest of his skin. He laughs a little, again, and it’s only after he gets a cattle prod the the arse for his trouble that he realizes why he’s laughing—it’s the irony, that someone marked with such a fearsome animal would end up here, shackled, beaten, and mere hours away from freezing to death.

Someone shoves Jaskier, stumbling, up onto the block, and the auctioneer shouts, “Here we’ve got an omega male, one year shy of twenty! He’s a healthy specimen, but he’s _fugitivus_ , so we’ll start the bidding at five ducats.”

There’s a commotion in the crowd, someone shoving their way forward from the back, drawing swords. Jaskier thinks it’s unrelated at first—a cutpurse must have made a poor choice of target—until the man, whoever he is, yells, “No you bloody well _won’t,_ ” and a knife sticks itself in the auctioneer’s throat.

Jaskier stares, wide-eyed, as a witcher steps out of the crowd. He’s never seen a witcher, but he’s heard the stories; warriors with golden eyes, black armor, twin swords. The right side of the man’s face is warped by a wicked scar, brown hair soaked and hanging around his face in a dripping mop, and he looks _furious_.

He rushes onto the stage and catches Jaskier against his shoulder, and it’s only then that Jaskier realizes he’s fallen to his knees, swaying dangerously by the edge of the auction block. Even though his leather armor is slicked with rain, the man is _warm_ , and Jaskier leans his weight limply into him without thinking, his forehead tucked tight against the blazing heat of the witcher’s neck.

“You’re alright,” the man murmurs against his hair. “I’ve got you now.”

 _Lucky,_ Jaskier thinks, feverish and more than a little hysterical. And then everything goes dark.

—

The next time Jaskier’s aware of anything, it’s night, he’s bedded down in linens nearly as nice as the ones at the Lettenhove estate, and Ban Gléann is on fire.

By the light of the fire outside, he can see a man sitting in a wooden chair on the other side of the room. It takes Jaskier a long moment to recognize him as the witcher from the auction, the one who—rescued him? bought him? He’s sitting with his head in his hand, looking troubled by something; Jaskier would guess that what’s bothering him is the fact that the entire citadel seems to be ablaze, but by the way he’s sitting, shoulders slumped as if a great weight has been left upon them, it’s some less urgent matter, some vexation of the heart.

Jaskier doesn’t move from his place in bed. He tries to keep his breathing slow, steady, even, but it’s difficult. When he wakes up in strange inns with strange men, it’s never a sign of glad tidings. At least this man is still clothed; perhaps he finds no pleasure in an unresponsive bedmate. Or perhaps he finds no sense in pursuing pleasures of the flesh, when there’s a chance his flesh might soon be set aflame. 

Jaskier’s not sure how long he lays there—minutes? hours?—listening to the roar of the fire outside, the clash of steel, and the panicked screams of cityfolk, and watching the witcher sit in contemplation. But at last there’s a crash downstairs, like someone’s kicked in the front door, and the witcher erupts out of his seat and out the door, sword drawn. The second the door closes behind him, Jaskier’s up and out of bed. He’s surprised to find himself in warm trousers and a woollen tunic finer than anything he’s worn since he left Redania, but there’s no time to stop and puzzle out why. He finds boots in his size by the bed, swipes a heavy fur-lined cloak from a hook on the wall, and is halfway out the door when he hesitates.

There are letters on the desk. Piles of handwritten correspondence, flickering orange in the firelight. Now that he’s warm and clothed and starting to feel a bit like his old self, Jaskier feels an incipient, niggling sense of curiosity.

Raised voices drift up the stairs from the ground floor of the inn; whatever’s going on down there, it seems it’s going to occupy the witcher for a while longer. Jaskier hurries over to the desk and picks up the letters with greedy hands. It’s been so long since he’s held parchment that it makes him a bit giddy, and he reads quicker than he ought, not quite understanding everything he’s seeing. The witcher’s name seems to be Eskel, he seems to have written urgently to someone named Geralt; two people called Yennefer and Vesemir seem to have replied, though when Jaskier tries to slow down and parse out what the letters are actually saying, most of it is in some strange, confounding code. He sets the letters aside, looking for ownership papers or a receipt of sale, something he can burn to cover his tracks. But all he finds under the letters is an careful, unskilled ink drawing of a wolf’s head.

His soulmark. Why would this strange witcher care about his soulmark?

There’s a noise outside the room, sharper and closer than before. Jaskier rushes to the window, knowing it’s the witcher—Eskel—coming back. The room is only on the second storey; Jaskier jumped out of taller trees, as a child. He slides the window up, swings his legs out over the ledge, shimmies down to his fingertips, and drops. The impact jars his legs, and he knows his knees will be sore for a few days yet, but that’s little price to pay for freedom.

All around him, the narrow streets are clogged with smoke, people rushing about with buckets of water, faces streaked with soot and tears and desperation. He hears the witcher upstairs, voice rough and alarmed as he returns to the room to find his slave gone; Jaskier doesn’t wait for him to notice the open window.

He runs.

—

He doesn’t stop running until he reaches Ard Carraigh.

As a child, he visited the capital of Kaedwen with his family as part of a Redanian envoy to the wedding of the king’s niece. His memories aren’t so much of the city itself as a royal fiction of it; the king’s colors hanging from every window, processions of noble carriages from across the continent moving down wide, clean streets littered with flower petals, choirs of common folk raising their voices in laudatory song. He was only four and had never left the Lettenhove estate, so to him it had all seemed grand and exciting, like a page out of a story book come to life. He’d sat on his mother’s lap, watching out the window of the carriage as fine purebred horses and knights in Redanian livery rode alongside, and had been so tired by the time they made it to the actual wedding that he’d slept through the whole thing on his older brother’s shoulder. He’d been too little, then, for them to hate him.

Now, having been disillusioned and cast unceremoniously into the real world, Jaskier sees Ard Carraigh for what it is: a cesspool. Nonetheless, it’s a cesspool which, when he enters, he enters a free man, so he doesn’t look on it with anywhere near the disdain that a person of his noble birth should. He’s delighted by the band of drunks singing raucously at midmorning, charmed by the considerate way people on the second floor shout, “Heads!” before emptying their chamber pots into the street, tickled pink by the urchin who tries to cut his purse and glares at him accusingly when she finds it empty. He knows that, by the time the sun sets and he’s left out in the cold, nowhere to sleep except pressed up against the side of whatever building seems safest, he won’t look on it all so kindly, but right now it’s perfect.

Once he’d stumbled clear of the fires in Ban Gléann, fleeing with the other refugees down to a forest on the edge of a river, coughing and tripping and smelling of smoke, he found a coin purse in his boot with enough gold to buy passage in a caravan heading north. North—he’d decided to go north after hearing chatter in the refugee camp, rumors that Ban Gléann had been sacked by the White Wolf, that the witchers were freeing slaves from the market in great droves, giving them coin and food and housing in the unburnt parts of the city. South, he’d seen, and it had nothing to recommend it; North, he figured, sounded more promising.

He was careful, on the passage, to keep his brands hidden. He’d not seen any slavers in territory the White Wolf has conquered, but he wasn’t about to take any chances; there are still whispers, among those who resent the changes Kaer Morhen’s reign have brought to their way of life, that the White Wolf is not a benevolent king, but a tyrant, a vicious butcher who cuts down any and all who stand in his path. As a youth, Jaskier might have been inclined to believe the kinder of the two tales, but it’s been a long time since anyone’s shown him even the most basic kindness.

It took all of his gold— _Eskel’s_ gold—to get to Ard Carraigh, so Jaskier figures the first thing to do is make some more of it. He stops outside a music shop first, stares in the window at the fine, artisan-crafted instruments, but the sight of them fills him with such a fragile, _dangerous_ hope that he moves on without inquiring inside. Next is a baker’s, where the proprietor takes one look at him and tells him he hasn’t got the arm strength to knead enough dough for a single sweet bun. Next a jeweller’s, where, despite being impressed by Jaskier’s knowledge of Temerian rubies, the proprietor turns him away with the excuse that he’s already got two apprentices, and he doesn’t even really like having that many.

Jaskier works his way down an entire city street, inquiring in every establishment. A crusty old man behind the bar at a tavern offers him a position as a barman, but the look he gives Jaskier is so lascivious that Jaskier feels like he’s been groped, so he says politely that he’ll think about it and beats a hasty retreat.

At the end of the street, down a narrow alleyway and a flight of shallow stone stairs, he comes to a brothel.

His first instinct is to move on. Though he had plenty of perfectly satisfying sex during his four years at Oxenfurt, those were the teenage dalliances of the academic noblesse, floral-scented interludes in the beds of duchesses looking to add the coveted _omega male_ to their list of conquests.

All his encounters since have been decidedly more bloody, and less voluntary. He had vague memories, already tainted by the haze of heat, of his slavers renting him out for a hefty bag of coin, calling him a _rare bird_. And older memories—sharper, but not much sharper, since he’d been drugged and tossed over the back of a horse at the time—of his father talking urgently to a slaver, answering, when the slaver asked, ‘What is he good for?’ _He moans like a fucking whore when he’s in heat_.

Maybe, Jaskier reasons, being treated like an object isn’t so bad when you’re getting paid. Anyways, all the brothels in Oxenfurt employed big men who’d toss the patrons out on their arse if they got too violent with the merchandise; at least this way, when his heat hits in a few weeks, he won’t be left penniless in the street to be raped and left for dead by the nearest alpha.

A bell rings over his head as he pushes through the heavy oak door. Inside, the place is warm and fragrant, like someone’s smeared cinnamon between the floorboards. Curtains of beads hang across all the doorways, and they’re not solid barriers but Jaskier gets the sense that they corral patrons effectively enough. It’s not _homey_ , he wouldn’t say, but there are soft-looking chaise lounges and paintings hung on the wall that are strange but framed in a way that’s almost proud, like they were done by family members; it is, surprisingly, quaint, in a way that puts Jaskier immediately at ease. But then, he does suppose that’s the point.

After a minute, a redheaded woman comes through one of the beaded curtains, wrapped in a silk robe that leaves little to the imagination. “Good evening,” she says, in a clipped Kovir accent. “What would you like?”

“Ah,” Jaskier flounders. “I’m not—”

“Male, female, alpha, omega, both, neither. We’ve got at least one of each, though if you want someone specific, you might have to wait.”

“I was actually hoping you were hiring,” Jaskier says in a rush.

The woman raises one eyebrow, which Jaskier gets the sense is as much emotion as she ever shows on her face. Probably a good skill, for a woman of her profession. She comes around the chaise lounge and starts to reach for him, then stops and gives him a quiet, questioning look. Jaskier reads it as her asking permission to touch him, and, heart in his throat, nods. Her hands are firm but gentle, not cruel, as she pulls out his arms, pats down his chest and his sides and his buttocks, trying, Jaskier realizes, to get a sense of the shape of his body under his heavy winter clothes.

Her touch is as impersonal as the slavers’ had been, but there’s no malice behind it, no sense that she’s handling a piece of meat instead of a human being, and that makes all the difference. She drops her hands, and there’s a tense moment where she scrutinizes the bulge in the front of Jaskier’s trousers, which drags on for so long that he gives her a little wave and a _go ahead_ look, inviting her to take stock. She does, and, to her credit, is quick about it. When that’s over, she pins him with another long, considering look, then says, “You’ll want to talk to Triss. She’s downstairs.”

Jaskier’s left to find ‘downstairs’ on his own, but the brothel’s not large so it’s not that difficult. The basement level, which seems to have only recently been a wine cellar, is a workshop of sorts. Dried plants hang from the ceiling; work benches are arranged around the outer walls, covered in jars and mortars; a woman with an impressive head of frizzy black hair who must be the aforementioned Triss labors over a complex series of tubes and vials, sweating in the steam.

“Triss?” Jaskier asks, cautiously. “Are you the madam?”

Triss laughs without looking up from her concoction. “Hardly. But the madam died last summer and no one seems at all eager to find a new one, so for now I’m all there is. Can I help you?”

“The woman upstairs said to see you about a job. A whoring job, as it were.”

 _That_ seems to interest her enough to look up from her work. She wipes her hands on her smock, sizing him up as she crosses the room, and offers her hand to shake. Jaskier, still feeling a bit awkward about the whole ‘human interaction’ thing after the last year, is a bit slow in responding. “Jaskier,” he says, when he does manage it.

“Jaskier what?”

“Just Jaskier, if you don’t mind.” The answer probably comes too quickly for her think that he’s _not_ trying to cover something up, but he figures that’s alright. No one expects whores to be paragons of honesty.

“Alright, ‘just Jaskier,’” Triss teases, with a faint smile. “As luck would have it, we’ve just lost one of our men.”

Jaskier shuffles, suddenly anxious. “Lost?”

“Oh, he went off with some acting troupe,” Triss assures him. “Not sure he’s got much talent if the way he fakes it in bed is any indicator, but to each his own.”

“Well.” Jaskier relaxes. “I suppose that’s lucky, then.”

There he goes again, with his radical reinterpretation of the word _luck_.

“Anyhow,” Triss goes back to her potions. Jaskier drifts after her, looking around at the plants, the odd, slimy things in jars. “What are you?”

“Omega,” Jaskier forces himself to say, before he can chicken out.

Triss makes a surprised sound. “Are you really?”

Jaskier nods, swallowing down a wave of nausea, and barrels on, “And I don’t—I’ve no problem selling my body, but I’d prefer not to sell my heats.”

A pestle clatters to the table. Jaskier avoids Triss’ eyes for a long moment, fairly certain that when he looks over he’ll see her welcoming expression gone suddenly cold. But instead of telling him to get out, she says, softly, “I’d never ask you to do something like that. No one here would.”

He does look over then, and catches only a glimpse of her disgusted, pitying expression before she picks up her spoon and gets back to work. For the first time in as long as he can remember, he feels the hot pressure of tears at the back of his throat, sniffs hard to get rid of them. Now is certainly not the time. _Never_ is the time.

“I’ll have to make sure you’re not carrying any diseases,” Triss says, after a time. “If you are, I’ll get you on the right potions to treat them. Tell the woman upstairs I want you set up in a room in the meantime; they’re not the finest accomodations, but they’re at least private. Your pay includes room and board, and two meals a day. You’ll need some more enticing clothes, as well, but I’m afraid you’ll have to reimburse us for them once you’ve earned enough—we’re not made of money.”

“Of course,” Jaskier says, almost numb with how well this has all gone. “Of course, I understand.”

“Oh,” Triss says, as Jaskier starts back upstairs. “One more thing. The man who left was our resident bard. I don’t suppose you can carry a tune, can you?”

 _Lucky,_ Jaskier thinks again.

To Triss, he smiles. “Yes. Yes, I can.”

—

The brothel, which he finds out after a full week of residency is called Swann’s Neck, welcomes Jaskier with open arms and open legs.

Well, at first it welcomes him with badly-concealed skepticism and a lot of jokes about how he handles his silverwear like he’s dining with the queen of Kaedwen, but after he gets hold of a lute and belts a few bawdy limericks like he was born to it—standing on the table and stomping his feet and leading the entire dining room, whores and patrons alike, through all twelve verses of _The Fishmonger’s Daughter—_ they warm up so fast he hesitates to even call it ‘overnight.’

The redhead woman, who eventually gets around to introducing herself as Shani, pulls him aside one morning, when everyone else is still sleeping off a hard night of work, and shows him the slaver’s brand on the bottom of her foot. “I was very skittish, when I first came here,” she tells him, with that no-nonsense frankness that he’s come to expect from her. “Most men don’t like their whores to be skittish. I can teach you how to keep your head, if you like.”

“Please,” Jaskier says, tremulous.

Her method relies mostly on exposure therapy. That first morning, she orders him to strip naked, sits him in a chair near the window, and runs her hands all over him in the cool dawn light. Jaskier’s whole body shakes, and he doesn’t get hard—doesn’t get anywhere close to hard—but Shani doesn’t seem surprised. She takes his hand and guides it between her legs, pressing his fingertips into the hot, wet mouth of her cunt, telling him all the while to breathe, to focus on what he’s doing. _Quiet the mind,_ she tells him. _Live in the body_.

They work in the morning hours, because Shani has clients at night. After that first encounter, Jaskier sits in his room all day on the unadorned floor, head in his hands, feeling a million miles away and struggling to find his way back to himself. But then he goes down and sings at supper, loud and fast and joyous and barking, and goes to bed determined to try again in the morning.

Shani is patient with him. She’s not kind, but she’s patient, waiting silently for him to catch up to her, sitting back on her heels when he asks her to stop, regarding him with sharp, intelligent eyes. She gets him used to touching her before she goes anywhere near his cock, teaches him to eat her out and fuck her with his fingers and stretch her asshole with oils and careful attention until it’s loose enough to fit the smooth glass dildo she keeps in a drawer with her contraceptive potions. And then, when she declares him ready—when she can run her hand all the way up his inner thigh, to the place where his pubic hair starts, without having him turn to mindless panic, she gets on her knees and sucks his cock. Jaskier comes in less than a minute, and is so surprised by his own orgasm that he pulls her head away from his crotch, gaping.

Shani gives him a smug little smile.

She is, he decides, a gorgeous, gorgeous angel, sent by Melitele to shepherd Jaskier back into the wonderful world of sexual gratification. Over the course of a week, she takes him from a terrified state in which every touch to his naked skin registers as a threat, to something almost like the cocksure confidence he strutted about with at Oxenfurt. She presses her heels to his arse and guides his cock as deep inside her as it will go; she opens him up with her narrow fingers and an overabundance of lavender-scented oil and puts on a harness and fucks him until he can’t remember his own name, can’t remember anything but the feeling of tiny avian muscles fluttering in his calves and that glass dildo cold and smooth and perfect inside him; she invites one of the other whores into the room, a man named Ponn, and talks Jaskier through sucking his cock, through _taking_ his cock, and even (“You probably won’t get to do this, being an omega, but might as well—”) through fucking him.

He may still shock awake screaming in the middle of the night, heart beating hot and heavy in pure terror over some half-remembered vision of a man fucking him so hard he split the skin of his perineum, but he’s hardly the only one in Swann’s Neck who has demons, and anyways—Triss has potions for that.

—

The first time Jaskier sees the White Wolf, he’s returning with his army of witchers from the conquest of Ban Gléann. It’s early enough in the day that no one is working yet, so they all pile up on to the roof to watch the procession. The sky is clear and cold overhead; Jaskier huddles with Shani beneath a heavy black fur and lets her laugh at him for his hatred of winter, his ‘southern sensibilities,’ not interested in trying to explain that he never used to mind until he’d had to spend half the season naked and hypothermic in the back of a slaver’s cart.

Most of the kings Jaskier’s met aren’t the sorts of men who are able to lift a sword, let alone wield one in battle, but he can tell even from this far away that the White Wolf is different. For one, he doesn’t ride a fine stallion, but instead a sort of normal-looking mare, chestnut, with a white mark on her face as if someone’s dragged a paintbrush from her ears to her nose. He’s at the front of the procession—which doesn’t seem like a procession at all, but rather just an _arrival_. There’s no fanfare, no colors flown, no captives dragged behind in rolling carts. The witchers, of which Jaskier estimates there are four or five dozen, talk and laugh amongst themselves as they ride, but the White Wolf is silent, frowning, his expression stormy. If Jaskier hadn’t already heard tell of the ease with which he’d routed Ban Gléann, he’d suspect the battle to have been some sort of painful, Pyrrhic victory.

To the White Wolf’s left rides a woman, a sorceress by the looks of her, kitted in a black dress that wouldn’t have been out of place at a royal court, if it weren’t for the long gash torn into the corset. Shani nudges him under the fur as the sorceress rides past and tells him quietly, “That’s Yennefer. Triss’ friend.”

 _Yennefer_. He’s heard that name before—read it, actually, on the correspondence back in that Ban Gléann inn. His eyes go to the White Wolf’s right hand, and sure enough, he recognizes the man. Eskel. The witcher who, he’s really starting to think, had not bought him at the slave market, but rather stolen him. Rescued him. He nods Shani’s attention in that direction. “Who’s that, on the Wolf’s right?”

“Eskel,” she says, confirming his suspicions. “The White Wolf’s right hand. He keeps a firm grip on law and order within the kingdom, but also? He likes when I stick my little finger up his arse.”

Jaskier snorts a laugh so hard he gets a bit of spit on his chin, but Shani just laughs with him and wipes it off on the fur. That’s one of the lovely things about whores; they’re not much bothered by bodily fluids.

They sit on the roof watching the last of the witchers ride past, and Jaskier tries not to think about how the White Wolf—the warlord king of this cold and unforgiving region he’s found himself living in—is the most beautiful man he’s ever seen.

—

His first heat at Swann’s Neck, Jaskier spends the entire day before fretting, terrified that one of his alpha clients is going to smell it on him through the layers of scented perfumes, that Triss is going to get an offer so good she’ll go back on her word and make him spend it with someone. That doesn’t happen. All that happens is Triss comes to find him after supper, after he’s treated everyone to a slow, sad love song, and leads him to the ‘heat room’ in the cellar.

“It’s soundproof and smell-proof,” she assures him. “Plus, either me or another omega will be right outside in the workshop the whole time.” She must sense his nervousness, because she runs a hand lightly, comfortingly over his back, and adds, “We’ve all been using this system for years, myself included. It’s safe, Jaskier.”

“Thank you.” He _does_ feel grateful—whoppingly, enormously grateful—but it’s still tough to muster a smile. “Really, Triss, thank you.”

By the time the sun rises, his heat is on him in earnest.

The room in the cellar isn’t uncomfortable by any standard; the low-frame bed is piled high with pillows and furs, more than enough to keep out the cold even after the fire in the hearth burns out. And there are aids—thank Melitele there are aids. Jaskier finds a dildo blown from the same glass as Shani’s, this one with the twisted shape of a knot on the end, shoves it as deep up his loose, lubricated hole as it will go, and essentially leaves it there for two days. It’s still not enough; he aches for something he can’t describe, feels as if there’s a hand inside his ribcage, wrapped around his internal organs, pulling him towards something that’s just barely out of reach, but no matter how much he wails, and begs, and moans for relief, the door stays shut. The room, as Triss promised, really is soundproof.

Jaskier curls up on his side under a deep pile of furs, all but the very top of his head sheltered in darkness, all the blood in his body beating ceaselessly in his cock, arse clenching and unclenching around that glass dildo with no relief. Somehow, the cold still finds him—or, he imagines that it does, covered in a thin, crusty sheen of sweat and shaking, shaking, like he shook on that auction block and shook in that slaver’s cart and shook during his first heat, small and scared and confused and alone. He’s still most of those things, but at least he’s not confused. The shrunken, distant part of his brain that’s still functioning knows exactly what this is.

When he stops feeling nauseous long enough to touch himself, he finds that he tumbles swiftly to orgasm, thinking, strangely, of long white hair, golden eyes, and hands big enough to span the width of his sides. He’s too out of it to know, at the time, that he’s thinking of the White Wolf, but when he finally surfaces from the haze, he has vague memories of turning his face into a broad chest, gasping against the side of a strong jaw, laying loose and sated beneath a witcher’s heavy, comfortable weight.

It’s night when he emerges from the heat room.

Triss’ workshop is deserted. The sounds of a raucous supper drift down the staircase, through the floorboards overhead; it only ever gets that loud when a large group of men all come in together, and Jaskier doesn’t quite feel up to servicing any soldiers tonight, so instead he makes quick use of the washbasin that someone’s thoughtfully left next to the door, and slips up the back way to his room.

He’s not _sore_ , exactly—it’s the first time in a while he hasn’t been sore after a heat—but he does feel a bit tender, as if anyone touches him the wrong way he might break into tears. He doesn’t even know what the ‘wrong way’ is, but he has a feeling their patrons probably do.

The upstairs hallway is dark and quiet, but not empty. Ponn is pressed up against the wall outside his room with a large man attached by the mouth to his neck. When he sees they’re no longer alone, he eases the man off and leads him inside his room, and Jaskier catches a flash of golden eyes. _Witchers_. The rowdy bunch of men in the dining room downstairs must be witchers.

Heart speeding, Jaskier slips inside his room and closes the door behind him. He’s not scared of witchers, not really—all the ones he’s run into in the streets and at the market have seemed perfectly civil, if a bit taciturn and rough around the edges. But he’s struck by the sudden, insane fear that one of the witchers downstairs might be Eskel, someone who could recognize him. There are scars through his slaver’s brands now, knotted and still-healing, that prove him a freedman, and everything he’s heard about the White Wolf paints him and his cohort more as a breaker and chains and savior of men than someone who would abide human slavery, but Jaskier’s not quite ready to test the truth of that benevolence. He douses the oil lamp on his armoire, picks up his lute, and lays back in bed, trying to distract himself from the noise downstairs by plucking absently at strings, listening to the soft whisper of their music.

There’s a quiet knock on the door.

Jaskier sits up so fast his head spins. The knock comes again, just as quiet as before. He figures it must be one of the girls come to check on him—patrons don’t knock so unobtrusively—so he sets his lute aside and gets up to answer. It’s Triss. She takes in the deep circles under his eyes and the still-rumpled state of his clothes, and something like apology crosses her features. “I’m sorry to have to ask,” she says, in a low voice. “I know how it is when you’ve just finished a heat, but we’ve got, well, rather a unique client, looking for a male omega, and I don’t exactly trust Olly when it comes to matters of discretion.”

“Certainly not,” Jaskier agrees, automatically. Olly’s the biggest blabbermouth Jaskier’s ever met, and he’s spent time at Oxenfurt.

“Could you…?” Triss sounds so hesitant that Jaskier’s pretty sure he’d do anything she asked. “I mean, I’m willing to tell him we can’t accommodate him, if it comes down to it, but if you’re feeling up to it I’d really rather not. I think you’ll see he’s a helpful man to have as a patron, and he really never asks for anything—”

“Triss,” Jaskier cuts her off, not wanting to see the uncertainty in her eyes for another second. “I can handle it.”

“You’re sure?”

Jaskier wants to help. He wants Triss, and everyone at Swann’s Neck, to be happy and well-off and have as many the influental patrons they can handle. “I’m sure.”

“Alright.” She smiles thankfully, squeezes his arm. “Alright, then. Meet him round the back staircase, when you’re ready.”

“Is that an innuendo?”

Triss gives him a playful, cutting look. She hates lowest-common-denominator humor, but Jaskier finds these days it’s all he’s capable of. He’s out of practice in the subtle art of telling someone to fuck off without offending them.

Triss disappears back down the main staircase into the dining room, and Jaskier sighs, heading back the way he came. Most clients prefer the privacy of a boudoir, but some get off on the voyeuristic thrill of a semi-public encounter, so Swann’s Neck has a few pre-determined nooks to herd clients to that are out of the way, but not _too_ out of the way. The back stair is one of them.

It’s dark, cramped, secluded; close enough in space to the main dining room that you can hear people’s voices, but far enough away by use of actual corridors that there’s no risk of a lost patron wandering through. The stairs creak under Jaskier’s feet as he descends. Someone else is already waiting for him; he sees the flash of golden eyes in the dark before he recognizes who it is.

The White Wolf.

He’s even more striking up close. Half of his hair is drawn back in a tight knot, and it’s been a long while since he’s had a good shave, but it works on him—works very, very well. He’s not that much taller than Jaskier, but he’s got at least five stone on him, and it looks like it’s all muscle. He watches Jaskier unwaveringly as he comes down the stairs towards him, and it’s hard to get a read on him, to tell if he likes what he sees, if he’s disappointed or aroused or indiffirent, but for some reason Jaskier’s not afraid. He feels safe, somehow, as if he could’ve met the White Wolf naked and freezing, vulnerable, cast out in the street, mindless with heat, and still he wouldn’t be in any danger at all. It’s an inexplicable instinct. It makes no sense.

Most people who pay for his company like to give Jaskier an appraising look when they first see him, but the White Wolf doesn’t look away from his eyes. “You’re Jaskier,” he says, in a rough, low voice.

It’s not a question. “You’re the White Wolf,” Jaskier replies.

“Hm.” The witcher’s rumble seems to be both agreement and disagreement at the same time. “My name is Geralt.”

That strikes up a distant chord of memory in Jaskier’s mind, but before he can chase that particular rabbit, the White Wolf— _Geralt_ —steps forward, crowding Jaskier against the wall. He’s not touching him yet, just looming, but the force of his gaze is so intense that Jaskier feels his hearbeat start to race in his chest. There’s nothing forceful about it, though. If anything, it’s… _considering_.

“You just had your heat,” Geralt murmurs. “I can smell it on you.”

“Sorry,” Jaskier babbles, “I haven’t had time to nip down to the baths—”

“No.” Geralt’s eyelids droop, just a bit, like the days of come and sweat he’s smelling on Jaskier’s skin is somehow pleasurable in itself. “It’s good.”

“Ah. Well, you’re welcome, then.”

Geralt’s lips quirk, in a way that almost seems like he’s considering saying ‘thank you.’ His hands hover over Jaskier’s sides. Jaskier sucks in an infinitisemal breath, bracing for the shock of being grabbed, but it never comes. He meets Geralt’s eyes, mere inches away from his own, and— _gods—_ finds the witcher’s pupils gone wide and dark, lustful, even though they haven’t so much as touched.

“Can I?” Geralt asks.

He might be the first man in the history of the world to ever ask a whore’s permission. It does something strange and wonderful to Jaskier’s insides, seeing this beast of a man, this _king_ , waiting with tense, bated breath for his approval. Insane as it seems, he thinks that if he said ‘no,’ Geralt might even listen.

“Yes,” he says instead.

Geralt’s hands come down on Jaskier’s sides, just as large and strong as he’d expected them to be. He presses Jaskier back against the wall, so there’s no space between their bodies, until all of Jaskier’s senses are full of _witcher_. The staircase is barely wide enough for them to fit widthwise like this; if Geralt took half a step back, he’d hit the wall, but then again Jaskier supposes neither of them are much interested in taking half a step back. Noise filters in from the dining room, the sort of indignant roaring that suggests a high-stakes game of Gwent is being played, but Jaskier can’t hear it; can’t, honestly, hear anything but the shallow rasp of the witcher’s breath, close enough to dry the faint trace of saliva on Jaskier’s lips. The bottoms of Jaskier’s feet are barely touching the ground, so pinned is he by Geralt’s weight. His cock throbs, but more urgent is the emptiness of his mouth, the desire to _taste_. Even in the throes of heat, he’s never wanted to be kissed so badly in his life.

Geralt, mercifully, obliges. Jaskier moans the second their lips touch, moans deeper as the king presses a thumb to his chin, opening his mouth. His legs go weak. He hopes Geralt’s not after anything too fancy, because after being kissed like this he’s not sure he’ll be much use; all he wants to do, nestled there in the dark with his arms around Geralt’s neck and Geralt’s tongue moving slow and rhythmically inside his mouth, is lay back and get _fucked_. If the White Wolf fucks as well as he kisses, Jaskier knows he’ll be ruined for other men, because— _gods_. Gods.

It’s not destined to be a liesurely fuck, wedged as they are in the back stair, and a minute later Geralt’s hands are at the laces of Jaskier’s trousers, tugging roughly to get to skin. He finds it before long; Jaskier didn’t do the laces as tight as he usually does, in deference to his overstimulated member, and at the first bump of Geralt’s knuckles he has to bite his lip hard to keep from coming. He’s an embarrassment to his profession, really, but Jaskier feels he can hardly be blamed for having a hair trigger when he’s about to be fucked against the wall by, well, _Geralt_. He tries to give something back, to give Geralt a bit of what he’s paying for, grabs Geralt’s head in both hands and ducks to suck bruises into his neck, but Geralt only turns to peck a brief answering kiss to the side of his face before crouching and pulling his trousers down over the curve of his arse, past his hips, down his legs—off. He laves an open-mouthed kiss to the hinge of Jaskier’s knee and runs his nose up the inside of his thigh, where he must still smell like the messiest depths of his heat, before coming back to Jaskier’s mouth. Words are failing him, somehow, for all that he’s a bard.

They fail him even more when Geralt slides calloused fingers over the tender skin of his perineum, and finds his hole. Jaskier’s still loose and slick from the knotted dildo, and he makes a wordless, happy noise in the back of his throat as Geralt’s fingers press into him easily.

“ _Fuck,”_ Geralt says tightly, and kisses the last of the sound from Jaskier’s lips. His third finger meets nearly no resistance, but he still takes the time to stretch, to make sure Jaskier’s ready even there’s enough oil left that Jaskier could probably take two witchers without thinking. He whines against Geralt’s mouth and claws at his shoulders, and like the trunk of a great tree Geralt holds him up, unyielding, as if Jaskier weighs nothing. After a long minute he must judge Jaskier adequately stretched, because his hand disappears from between Jaskier’s legs and he tugs savagely at the laces of his own trousers, freeing his cock. Jaskier doesn’t see it; they’re pressed too close together, but Geralt lifts him and hikes his legs around his waist, and he _feels_ it. The hot, insistent rod of it beneath his balls, and then against his hole.

The head of Geralt’s cock pops past that tight rim of muscle. Jaskier makes a loud, blustery noise like he’s seen god, because Geralt is _big_ , bigger than he expected, and he feels so, so full, like he’s been dying to feel for days, and Geralt tucks his nose under Jaskier’s jaw and breathes in deep at the sweaty underside of his neck, like he can smell just how badly Jaskier wanted it and for how long, and it’s all so much. It’s all so much.

“Wait,” he says, mostly to see if Geralt will.

Geralt does.

Jaskier pants like he’s running from a fire, folded up against the wall, legs weak and shaking around the witcher’s solid waist. His arse clenches around the first two inches of Geralt’s cock, and under his doublet, which hasn’t come off— _how_ have no more of their clothes come off since Jaskier’s trousers?—his skin feels so hot he’s fairly certain he might catch fire. He’s not sure he cares. He’s alight with how good it feels, and Geralt hasn’t even started fucking him yet. _Gods_ , he wants Geralt to fuck him.

“Okay,” he says, like he was only adjusting to Geralt’s girth. “Okay, move.”

Geralt drags a kiss across his lips as if to say ‘thank you,’ grabs Jaskier’s bare hips, and presses the rest of the way inside.

Their foreheads rest together. Jaskier keeps his eyes open the whole time, watching the witcher watch him as his balls come to rest against Jaskier’s buttocks. He grabs hold of Geralt’s hair, and gets a low growl in response, a vibration that he feels in the place where Geralt’s nestled deep against the core of him. And then Geralt _moves_. The floorboards creak under their combined weight, like bedsprings, and Jaskier clings to Geralt with all of his limbs and tries very, very hard not to come immediately. It’s fast, but not rough; Geralt’s thrusts are short and shallow, never dragging too far out of Jaskier’s body, moving just enough to keep hitting over and over that spot that makes Jaskier’s vision white out. “Geralt,” he moans, “ _Geralt—”_ and his eyes must start to close, because the White Wolf takes hold of his face, holding him up with one arm, and orders, “Look at me.”

Jaskier’s eyes fly open. Geralt’s breathing in quick, sharp huffs against his mouth, not with exertion but with pleasure. Jaskier’s cock is trapped between their bodies, against the rough surface of Geralt’s leather armor, and he feels so wildly, insanely good that he swears the next time he hears Geralt’s voice he’s going to come.

It’s a good thing, then, that the very next thing Geralt says is, “I want you to come on my cock.”

 _Gladly_ , Jaskier means to say, but he’s fairly certain it comes out as a wordless, wanton moan. Geralt pulls out a little further and _slams_ back into him, hitting that spot exactly, and Jaskier tumbles over the edge with a shout.

A second later, he feels the hot splurge of Geralt’s come inside him, the witcher nearly silent except for a small, surprised grunt.

The entire encounter takes maybe five minutes.

But Jaskier lays in bed that night, still feeling the phantom of the witcher inside him, and feels as if he’s known Geralt for centuries. It’s probably a naïve thing to think, him being a freedman whore and Geralt being the warrior king of fucking Kaedwen, but Jaskier traces his fingers over and over the slightly raised lines of his soulmark, the snarling face of the wolf he knows so well, and can’t shake the feeling that what he and the White Wolf did on the back stair wasn’t just sex.

—

The witchers turn out to be regular visitors to Swann’s Neck, at least while the army is laid over here in Ard Carraigh, but Jaskier doesn’t see Geralt again. He does, however, see rather a lot of the sorceress Yennefer.

From the frequency of her visits with Triss, Jaskier gets the sense that they’re old friends; _not_ , that is to say, the sort of old friends who pine for each other and wish they could spend more time in each other’s company, but the sort of old friends to whom anything can be told and with whom anything can be trusted. Yennefer sweeps in and out of Swann’s Neck like she owns the place and nags Triss about ‘wasting her talents’ over bottles of wine that would’ve cost too much even for the Lettenhoves. Jaskier likes her, really—she’s mean in a fun way, wickedly smart and drop-dead gorgeous—but it makes him nervous, having her around, because if she’s the White Wolf’s left hand than it stands to reason the right must not be far away.

He still doesn’t know what Eskel wanted with him, back in Ban Gléann. He’s overheard Yennefer talking to Triss in hushed voices after supper, so he knows a few things: that the raid of the city took place months before it was meant to, that the slave market was a top priority, and that for some reason the White Wolf had been “more savage and bloodthirsty than I’ve ever seen him,” according to Yennefer. Jaskier knows he’s missing bits of the story, but he supposes it’s something along the lines of their king _really_ not liking slavers, which suits Jaskier just fine.

A few months after his tryst with Geralt, a band of mercenaries rides into town. They seem to mean no harm, but they set up in the dining room at Swann’s Neck and stay there for three days, watching the comings and goings of everyone in the brothel with predatory, catlike attention.

Triss, who can’t very well kick them out when they’re paying so handsomely, but who’s unsettled by the fact that they _won’t leave_ , summons Yennefer down from the citadel and smuggles her in the back door. Yennefer tosses off her hood; Jaskier and Shani eavesdrop from the top of the stairs, but they’re unsubtle enough about it that Yennefer or Triss could tell them to get lost, if they really minded.

“They’ve been here nerly a week,” Triss says, in a hissed whisper. “When I asked what they wanted, they said they were looking for someone—some viscount from Redania.”

Jaskier’s stomach turns over, and his heartbeat speeds in his chest, but Shani doesn’t seem to notice.

“I told them we don’t get any nobility here,” Triss continues, “but they wouldn’t hear it. Apparently they had a sorcerer scry for them—must not have been very good if all he could get was a building, but still. I can’t have some viscount getting assassinated in my dining room. And I don’t want my people in the crossfire.”

Yennefer’s quiet for a moment, and then she says, “A _Redanian_ viscount?”

“Yes,” Triss snaps, impatient. “I don’t see what that has to—”

“Did you get a name?” Yennefer presses. “Even a family name. Anything.”

Triss frowns, confused. “Yes,” she says, slowly. “Lettenhove.”

Jaskier inhales sharply. Shani gives him a questioning look, but he only shakes his head and bites down on his fist to avoid making any more noise. At the bottom of the stairs, Yennefer is swearing up a storm.

“What?” Triss demands. “Melitele’s tits, Yen, what is it?”

“You cannot repeat this, Triss,” Yennefer orders. “I mean it.” Triss agrees, and Yennefer says, “Geralt’s mark is a match to a Redanian viscount. The youngest son of the Lettenhove family. Vesemir found out a few months ago, when we finally got hold of the records they keep for nobility, but apparently the Redanians have lost track of him. Eskel thought he found him at the slave market in Ban Gléann—”

“That’s why you moved up the attack?”

“Yes. But Eskel lost track of him in the chaos, and then he couldn’t find his scent with all the fire and smoke. And now, for there to be mercenaries here looking for him…” Yennefer shakes her head, swears again. “Word must have got out. Fuck. Do you know how much coin the White Wolf’s mate would go for? And we’d be _hamstrung_. Gods. I’ll have Eskel send some witchers down to scare off your mercenaries, but if you see a Redanian viscount—“

“You’ll be my first call,” Triss agrees.

Yennefer swears one last time, and disappears out the door.

Jaskier’s legs give out. He slides down the wall and sits down hard. Shani hovers above him, saying, “Jaskier? Jask?” but he doesn’t even really feel the touch of her hands. The White Wolf’s soulmark. _Geralt’s_ soulmark. It makes sense now, why Eskel rescued him from the auction block, why his mark is a wolf’s head, why when he’d had Geralt inside him on these very stairs he’d felt safer and more cared for than ever in his life.

Vaguely, he hears Shani telling him to breathe. She tugs at the buttons on his doublet, exposing his chest to the open air, still lingering with frost from the open back door, and the shock of cold is almost enough to bring him back around, but not quite. Shani gets up and runs off down the hall, probably to go find Triss, and Jaskier finds the presence of mind to roll his head forward into his hands and think _oh no_ , though he’s not really sure what he’s so panicked about. _Oh no_.

Footsteps clatter up the stairs, too heavy to be female. Jaskier rolls his head back up out of his hands, and sees a man standing over him.

After a moment Jaskier recognizes him. He’s one of the mercenaries. And he’s staring at Jaskier’s bared chest with barely-concealed glee.

“Oh,” Jaskier says, “no—”

 _It’s not me,_ that sentence is meant to finish. _It’s a mistake_. _Move along_.

The mercenary pulls a knife, and jams it into Jaskier’s chest.

Jaskier doesn’t make a sound. There’s suddenly no room in his lungs for air, what with the knife between his ribs. He stares down at it, at the mercenary’s dirty hand wrapped around the hilt, and for a long moment, they’re both frozen, and nothing hurts.

Then a lot of things happen all at once.

There’s a strange tearing noise downstairs, Triss shouts from the other end of the hall, and the mercenary yanks his blade out of Jaskier’s body. Jaskier gasps, and tastes blood in his mouth, and _hurts_. Someone yells, “Fuck, no!”; a witcher with shaved hair tackles the mercenary away from him; he tries to touch his chest and realizes his arms don’t work; Triss presses her hands to the bloody mess of his wound, looking at him with big, urgent eyes and telling him something he can’t hear; Jaskier hears his heart beat and sees a fresh gush of corresponding blood rush out of him at the same time, and feels like he’s been cheated out of something, and passes out.

—

He wakes up in Kaer Morhen.

“Ow,” he announces.

There are soft, gentle hands on the back of his head, guiding him to drink. He does. It’s dark in the room, curtains drawn so that only a faint sliver of daylight spears in, and he can’t see who it is, until she says, “There you go,” and he realizes it’s Triss. She eases him back onto the pillows when he’s done drinking, and he feels the bed dip as she sits down by his hip.

“Where…?” he asks, raspy.

“Kaer Morhen,” she answers. Even her voice is soft, like she doesn’t want to rattle him overly much with conversation. “Once I got you stabilized, the witchers wanted you back here. They say it’s more defensible.”

That doesn’t really make sense, but then Jaskier’s head is hurting rather a lot and the fact that he can’t really move his legs doesn’t make sense to him, either, so he figures he’s not exactly an authority on the subject. “What happened?”

“You got stabbed.”

“Yes, I remember that, thank you.” Jaskier tries to sit up, or at least makes a noise like he’s trying to sit up, so that Triss takes pity and stuffs a bunch of pillows behind his shoulders. There’s a sharp, burning ache in his abdomen that he figures is a knife wound, but after the life he’s led the idea of being helpless in repose is so abhorrent that even this, sitting up on his own, makes him feel better. “Why’d I get stabbed?”

“It seems you’re a viscount.”

Jaskier clears his throat, awkward. “Oh, I wouldn’t be quite so dramatic. I’m fairly certain I’ve been disowned.”

Triss smiles, more pitying than amused, and tucks a lock of hair out of his face. “I don’t know why they stabbed you instead of taking you, if that’s what you’re asking. But Lambert kept one of the mercenaries alive, and I believe they’re asking him rather impolitely in the dungeons.”

“Lambert?” Jaskier asks.

“One of Ponn’s regulars. Yen sent him round to scare off the mercenaries. Lucky she was so quick about it, too, or you’d be dead.”

“Lucky,” Jaskier echoes. There’s another thought niggling at the back of his mind, some realization that he had briefly before being almost-murdered, but he can’t for the life of him think what it is until he looks down and sees that the bandages on his chest are wrapped around his soulmark. “Geralt,” he says. “Is he—?”

“He’s nearby. He didn’t want to scare you when you woke up, thought I’d be more calming. But I can get him.”

Jaskier nods, heart in his throat, and Triss leaves.

It doesn’t make any sense, this sudden, bone-deep _need_ to see Geralt. Jaskier’s spoken maybe ten words to the man, all told, spent half as many minutes in his presence, but he suddenly feels cold and terrified and shaky, and knows that the only thing in the entire world that can make him feel steady is the White Wolf. It’s dangerous, is what it is, and probably not smart, but Jaskier sits there in an enormous bed in a room which, now he actually looks at it, is fit for a king, and clenches his fists in a thick white fur, and waits for his alpha.

He doesn’t have to wait long. Barely a minute after Triss slips out the door, it opens again to admit Geralt. He’s not in his armor, this time, but in trousers and a loose shirt, open at the neck to reveal a silver pendant and a soulmark identical to Jaskier’s own. He crosses the room in two strides, sinks onto the bed, makes as if to reach for Jaskier’s face and stops himself. “Can I?”

“Yes,” Jaskier says, and barely gets the word out before Geralt takes his head between his hands and kisses him. It’s a tender thing, but firm, without any of the hesitance that Jaskier would expect from a king who’s just found out he’s destined for a whore. Jaskier makes a needy noise against Geralt’s mouth, and Geralt pulls away.

“Hello,” Jaskier says.

Geralt’s thumb moves over his cheek. “Hello.”

The repetitive motion of Geralt’s thumb is so soothing that Jaskier feels his eyes start to droop. _No,_ he thinks, _no,_ because he’s only gotten in two more words, but he wraps his hand around Geralt’s wrist and manages to get one more out before he drifts off, which is, “Stay.”

The next time he wakes up, the room is full of witchers.

Sunlight pours through the open curtains, falling across a table covered in what Jaskier vaguely recognizes as a map of the continent. Geralt sits with Eskel and a witcher with a shaved head who Jaskier thinks must be Lambert, as well as an older man he hasn’t seen before, who’s pointing to the map and saying something in a voice too quiet for Jaskier to hear. The others listen intently, and comment, and move game pieces around that Jaskier realizes must represent the White Wolf’s troops. It’s a meeting of the king’s small council, a war summit, and somehow Jaskier has been allowed a front row seat. In case it’s a mistake, he clears his throat to let them know he’s woken.

“Jaskier,” Geralt’s up out of his seat and across the room in a moment, raising a tankard of water to Jaskier’s lips.

Jaskier drinks, and chokes, and drinks some more. It’s _good_. He’s not sure water has ever tasted so good, even after he’s been starved of it for days in the back of a slaver’s cart, wringing his own shirt for muddy moisture. He wipes his chin with the back of his hand when he’s done, and after a second realizes with a wobbly thrill of delight that he can move his arms again.

“How long have I been asleep?” he asks.

“A couple of days.” Geralt sets the tankard back on the bedside table. “Triss put you in a healing trance. She said you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t,” Jaskier agrees. “I’m sorry, this is all a bit weird.”

Geralt must notice his eyes flick over to the other witchers in the room, because he says _right_ and nods at them. “These are my men. Witchers, from the wolf school. Vesemir. Lambert. And Eskel.”

“Eskel,” Jaskier repeats. “I think we’ve met, actually.”

Eskel gives him an amused look. “Is that what you call it? Way I remember, I gallantly rescued you, only to have you disappear and lead me on a wild goose chase through all of Ban Gléann.”

“Sorry,” Jaskier shrugs. “Your fault for not shackling your slaves.”

The joke lands like a brick. Jaskier smiles a bit, encouraging them to laugh, then gives up when no one else seems to find the idea of slavery at all funny, and clears his throat again. “Anyway. Thanks. You, too, Lambert. Triss tells me if you hadn’t shown I’d have been fully murdered, instead of just a bit murdered.”

Lambert does laugh, at that. “Shit, Geralt. He’s funny. You sure he’s _your_ mate?”

Geralt grumbles at him to shut up, and Jaskier gets the sense that the _White Wolf_ is the one being teased, not him. It’s…strange. Nice, maybe.

Vesemir raps a silver wolf ring on the table, and everyone’s attention snaps to him, even the king’s. “Now that you’re awake,” he says, gold stare boring into Jaskier. “There are some things we need to discuss.” He seems to be waiting for permission, so Jaskier nods to give it. “You’re a Redanian nobleman. What were you doing at a slave market in Ban Gléann, as merchandise?”

Jaskier swallows. He’s not keen to talk on this subject, but then again, it’s not exactly a secret. He’s got no reason _not_ to tell them. Unless, maybe, when he tells them, they’ll realize that his family was right, that he’s not worth anything. Maybe they’ll realize he’s a waste of space, cast him out into the frozen, windswept mountains around Kaer Morhen with nothing but the clothes on his back, maybe—but no. He saw the mark on Geralt’s chest. He sees them all looking at him, now, not with irritation or impatience but with calm, with understanding, even as he sits in silence and tries to force himself to breathe normally, like some sort of crazy person.

Geralt sits down on the bed next to him and puts his hand on Jaskier’s leg, through the bedclothes. “You don’t have to.”

“It’s fine,” Jaskier musters a smile. “Sorry, I’ve just—I’ve never told anyone this. When I presented, my father decided to wait until the age of majority to see if I’d turn out to be matched with anyone useful. But I wasn’t, so. You know how it is. Can’t have an omega son in the house, it’s not good for the family image.”

“Your father sold you?” Eskel asks.

Jaskier presses his lips together, nods. “For a gold coin.”

Geralt growls, almost too low for human hearing. Jaskier looks at him in surprise, but then he realizes the king isn’t the only one who looks furious; his expression is mirrored by the three witchers at the table.

“Right,” Jaskier continues, shaken. “So, I’m afraid if a marriage treaty with Redania is what you’re after, I might not be your best bet. I’m not exactly sure how being sold into slavery affects one’s nobility, but I can’t imagine it’s a positive.”

“Hm,” Geralt rumbles, tense.

Vesemir takes pity on Jaskier, and translates. “We’re not planning on making peace with Redania. They’re scared we’re going to invade them, and they should be. It’s why they sent mercenaries after you—to try and gain leverage over us.”

“Why stab me, if they wanted me for leverage?”

Vesemir shrugs. “Our prisoner hanged himself before we could get it out of him. But I imagine it’s nothing good.”

Jaskier rather thinks that’s pointing out the obvious; anything that involves him getting stabbed seems pretty apparent to him to be ‘nothing good.’ “Well,” he says. “I suppose it’s lucky I wandered into a brothel full of witchers.”

Lambert laughs again. “That it is.”

—

Jaskier wonders if he’s not finally home.

Geralt makes it clear to him that he’s allowed to leave if he so pleases, but that, if he elects to stay at Kaer Morhen, he will never want for anything again.

 _A lute,_ Jaskier demands, as soon as Geralt’s done talking. _And lots and lots of parchment._

 _A lute,_ Geralt agrees, smiling faintly. _You’re a bard?_

The room he woke up in is, indeed, Geralt’s room, but Geralt insists in half as many words that he stay in it for the duration of his recovery. The White Wolf himself has taken up residence in a room across the hall, close enough that Jaskier can see through to the bed when both doors are open, but far enough that, Jaskier thinks, Geralt doesn’t feel smothered by him. During the day, Jaskier covers himself in ink stains and litters the bed with messy rolls of lyric-filled parchment, listening to Geralt and his advisors come and go, listening to swords clash on the training field out the open window, listening to the quiet, peaceful sounds of his lute, like snowflakes melting on the sill. It all feels distressingly familiar, but he can’t put his finger on it until one morning when Lambert’s sitting by his bedside, playing Gwent; he and his brothers used to play Gwent in bed, when one of them was sick. And despite the austerity of Kaer Morhen, these halls feel an awful lot like the Lettenhove estate.

When he voices this concern to Lambert, the witcher only laughs. “It’s just ‘cause you haven’t been outside this bloody room.”

“Well,” Jaskier says, annoyed, “I’m leaving the bloody room, then.”

Lambert tries many different methods of convincing him that he should _not_ leave the bloody room, not so long as he still has an open wound in his side, but Jaskier argues that since it’s stitched closed it’s not quite _open_ anymore, and anyways if he has to stay in bed a moment longer he might _re-_ open it himself. Lambert, in the face of being blamed for the sudden relapse of the White Wolf’s mate, grumbles and composes a few sonnets’ worth of colorful swears and helps Jaskier up.

At midmorning, everyone else is out on the training field, so the corridors are empty as Jaskier and Lambert totter along at an invalid’s pace. At least, Jaskier _thinks_ they’re empty, until they go to round a corner and he gets slammed square in the stomach by a vaguely child-sized blur.

“Ciri!” Lambert exclaims. “Fuck, watch where you’re running, cub.”

Jaskier doesn’t have the breath left in him to ask who ‘Ciri’ is, as he’s been catapulted back to death’s door. He leans against the wall and wheezes a lot, until Lambert looks at his stitches—all still intact—and tells him he’s being a baby. He and Ciri, who it turns out is an adorable blonde girl of about twelve, help Jaskier hobble back to Geralt’s chambers. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” Jaskier tells Lambert, as the witcher lowers him back onto the pillows. “Maybe we’ll get past the corner.”

Ciri invites herself to participate their game of Gwent, joining first Jaskier’s team when she sees his strategy and declares him ‘hopeless,’ and then Lambert’s when it becomes clear to her he’s somehow ‘worse.’

For a girl her age, she’s got a wickedly sharp wit, and the way she doesn’t even flinch when Lambert swears a blue streak makes Jaskier think she grew up here—or at least, around witchers. Judging by her blue eyes, she’s not a witcher herself, but she can certainly threaten bodily harm with the best of them. Geralt finds them just before supper, and seems unsurprised to find Ciri sitting cross-legged on Jaskier’s bed. He drops a kiss on her head and rumbles, “Told you not to bother him,” which makes Ciri turn to Jaskier and demand, “Jaskier, am I bothering you?”

Jaskier, still assimilating the idea that Geralt has a—ward? daughter?—that no one saw fit to tell him about, huffs a laugh. “Well, you’re thrashing me at Gwent, but I maintain that everyone needs a good thrashing every once and a while to keep them humble, so no, Ciri, you’re not bothering me.”

Geralt has someone bring up food to Jaskier’s room that night, and they all eat around the table; Jaskier, Geralt, Ciri, and Lambert, who has somehow gotten roped into the whole thing. And three days later, when Jaskier finally makes it past the corner, he joins Geralt at the high table for supper. The great hall is packed to bursting with witchers and common folk alike, all of them wearing those same silver pendants, with designs of wolves, bears, snakes, griffins; it’s loud, and warm, and lovely, and so far from anything that Jaskier ever experienced at the Lettenhove estate that he feels silly, all of a sudden, for even _thinking_ that place and this one were the same. He catches Lambert’s eye down the table, and he must be wearing some sort of awed expression on his face, because Lambert hides a laugh in his ale.

After another week, when he’s well enough that he can walk around the kaer without supervision, he brings his lute down to the great hall. When the food is gone, Geralt stands and waits for everyone to notice and fall silent, then sits again. Jaskier climbs up on his chair. It’s been a while since he’s played for a crowd of this size, _years_ , and not since his enslavement and subsequent emancipation, but he feels all those eyes on him, and it’s not a bad nervousness in his stomach. Not at all. It’s anticipation. Excitement. He strums the first note of a song—something kid-friendly, for Ciri, a wickedly fast jig that always makes his heart soar and his fingers ache—and starts to sing. He’s still tender, but he stomps his feet and gets up on the table and dances, because you can’t _not_ dance to this song, and before long he realizes that he’s not alone, that the witchers have come up and out of their seats and are stomping and dancing with him, shouting along and laughing and grabbing hands, that Ciri has jumped up on her chair, clapping delightedly, that even _Geralt_ has a small smile on his face.

Jaskier has always felt instinctually that he had to guard his happiness the same way he guarded his heartbreak, like a fragile little bird that could be snatched out of the air and crushed without a moment’s notice.

But now, with a lute in his hands and his mate’s eyes on him, singing a dancing tune at the top of his lungs with a room full of witchers, he lets himself feel it.

—

Most nights, Jaskier dreams of the cold; some nights, if he’s less fortunate, he dreams of his heats.

Tonight, he’s less fortunate. The men who raped him come to him more clearly in sleep than they do in his waking hours, the rancid smell of their breath and the violence of their cocks, the pain of the softest part of his body ripping open, the shame of it all, of being too mindless with heat to do anything but lay there beneath their moving bodies and take it. He dreams in shards, like knives behind his closed eyelids: dirty fingernails drawing blood at his hip; an elbow at his throat, his lungs empty and aching; voices just outside the door, and if he could only _yell_ , if he only had the presence of mind to _yell—_ but would they even come, to help a slave?

He wakes screaming.

There are hands on him—large hands, man’s hands, and he fights against them at first, until they yield and he takes a big breath of air and smells his alpha. Then he relaxes all at once, and catches the hands before they can go away, and pulls Geralt down into bed with him.

“Jaskier,” Geralt says, low and concerned. “What can I do?”

“You can hold me,” Jaskier says, without a moment of hesitation. “Please—”

He doesn’t have to finish the question.

Geralt slides beneath the covers and takes him in his arms all at once. Nestled against him, some panicked muscle in Jaskier’s chest quiets immediately, and he turns to hide his face in Geralt’s chest. For a few long minutes, all there is is the drumbeat of Geralt’s heart under his ear, the heat of his body, still soft and loose from sleep, and the way the pale predawn light illuminates Geralt’s flyaway hairs like silver filament. Jaskier’s heart stops galloping in his chest and comes to call, like it’s trying to match Geralt’s. He moves his fingertips softly against Geralt’s flank, thinking of music, of a lazy meandering string-pick like waking up in the morning, going to sleep at night, like the endless repetition of life into old age, into death. Geralt holds him tighter, and turns his lips against Jaskier’s hairline, and doesn’t ask.

Jaskier wants to tell him anyways. He doesn’t think Geralt will look at him any different once he knows; after all, plenty of whores have identical stories. Geralt must suspect, at least, that Jaskier’s sexual history is not without trauma.

Still—”You’re afraid,” Geralt murmurs. “I can smell it. Is it me?”

Jaskier shakes his head, not moving from his place buried in the witcher’s side. “Never, Geralt. Never you.”

“Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

Jaskier smiles faintly. “It’s not something you can kill.”

Geralt _hm_ s like he begs to differ, and it warms Jaskier’s heart. “Still. I want to know you, lark. I need to know you.”

So Jaskier tells him. “The slavers used to rent me out. Male omegas are worthless most of the time, but during heat we’re—how did they put it— _rare birds_. I’d pass out in the cart and wake up two days later in an inn somewhere, shackled to the bed. I don’t really remember much of what happened, during, but...” His voice shakes, and he makes himself keep talking, drawing strength in the protection of Geralt’s arms around him. “I remember after. Cleaning myself up. Bleeding for days, sitting on the wooden bench in the back of that cart…After the first time, I tried to run. I made it, too, for a while, but when they caught me again they branded me _fugitivus_.”

Geralt’s lips skim, oh-so-gently, over the ‘FGV’ brand on Jaskier’s left shoulder. It’s run through with a scar now, reclaimed, but Jaskier can still feel the burn of it like it was yesterday, how the wound stayed sticky and infected for weeks. “I can kill men,” Geralt says. “I’ve killed men for much less.”

“I don’t need you to kill them. I don’t even know who they are.”

“Hm,” Geralt rumbles. Jaskier’s getting good at translating his hums, but still he doesn’t know if that one means ‘alright, little bird,’ or ‘but we can find out.’ He’s surprised to find he doesn’t particularly mind either way.

He sinks deeper into Geralt, deeper into the covers; he feels like a glut for the witcher’s touch, deprived of it as he’s been since that first time he woke up, when Geralt held his face and kissed him, but it’s still too early to get out of bed, and he wants to fall asleep with his mate. “Stay?” he asks, against bare skin.

“Hm,” Geralt agrees.

Jaskier falls asleep in his witcher’s arms; when he wakes, Geralt is still there, chest rising and falling with the cadence of his breaths, sleep shirt slightly damp under Jaskier’s mouth. Jaskier turns and presses a kiss to his pectoral before he’s awake enough to register what he’s doing, and he stops himself a moment later, but too late; a contented hum vibrates under his lips, and a moment later he’s staring up into Geralt’s amber eyes, half-open and still lazy with sleep. Jaskier really, truly can’t help it; he slides up Geralt’s body and presses a kiss to his slack lips, not caring about his sleep breath or the way his stubble rasps against his chin or the fact that Geralt’s given no indication since that first night in the back stair that he wants Jaskier like this at all.

But he must, because when Jaskier moves to draw away, Geralt stops him with a hand on the back of his head. He presses a careful, close-mouthed kiss to Jaskier’s lips, and then another, and then says, “You don’t have to.”

Jaskier laughs, light and happy. “I know I don’t have to, you great lout. I wanted you then, and I want you _desperately_ now—”

Geralt drags him forward into an urgent kiss, and there are no more words for a while after that.

—

It takes the White Wolf a month to conquer all of Redania.

Jaskier spends most of that time cloistered in Kaer Morhen, helping Vesemir with Ciri’s academic lessons and composing and accompanying Triss back to Swann’s Neck to entertain with a song or two when the old witcher forgets he’s supposed to be babysitting him. A few times, Yennefer portals him and Ciri to join the army, keeping them well to the rear of the front, in the slightly larger but no less rustic tent where Ciri can leap into her father’s arms, where Jaskier can clean overlooked flecks of blood from behind his witcher’s ear and litter kisses across the back of his shoulders and play soft lute music until Ciri falls asleep, until all the war-weary tension melts from Geralt’s limbs. Whenever he asks Geralt how the war’s going, the only answer he gets is, “Fine”; the truth, he gets from Eskel.

Redania puts up a fight—more of a fight than Kaedwen. Their population is more concentrated, larger; their armies are bigger and better trained to fight as a unit, unlike Kaedwen’s scattered militias. The White Wolf’s armies will win; Eskel knows, from the start, that they’ll win, but it’s turning out to be more of a grudge match than they’d expected. In the end, the noblesse retreats to Tretogor and closes the moat, leaving the city nigh-impenetrable. The witcher army has them surrounded, they’ll starve them out within the year, but Geralt doesn’t want to starve common folk, and in the end it comes down to diplomacy. Not the witcher king’s strong suit.

Along with Yennefer, who has more than a little experience in the subtle art of courtly negotiation, Jaskier is summoned.

It’s amazing, he thinks, standing in a spring field and feeling no kinship whatsoever with the tall grass, the flowers, the Redanian sun, what a difference a year can make. From freezing to death on an auction block in Ban Gléann to here, preparing to accept the surrender of his birth country on behalf of a northern barbarian kingdom of which he is, for all intents and purposes, king consort.

Eskel stands at his right shoulder, Aubry at his left. Jaskier had overheard no specific instructions back at camp, but he _did_ see the look Geralt shot them before they stepped through Yennefer’s portal, dark and warning, and he knows that they’re here to make sure Jaskier doesn’t wander off and end up stabbed again. Geralt himself couldn’t come; King Radovid decided that, when he announced that he himself would not be attending. _Treaties,_ he’d said in his missive, _are a nobleman’s profession, and beneath the dignity of kings._ It’s exactly the sort of snobbery that Jaskier feels himself immune to, now he’s spent nearly half his life in various states of exile.

Still, he feels he should warn his compatriots. “Expect tricks,” he says to Yennefer, knowing Eskel and Aubry will be listening. “Sneaky language in the treaty itself, yes, but also delaying tactics, food poisoned just enough to make us uncomfortable, that sort of thing. Maybe an assassination attempt they can blame on a third party. A stray arrow while one of us is out taking a piss, or something.”

Yennefer tosses her hair, preeminently bored. “I hope they _do_ try something. It’ll make the proceedings more interesting, at least.”

Eskel chuckles. “If they send an arrow at me, I’ll bloody well catch it.”

Melitele’s tits, Jaskier’s taken up with madmen.

The Redanian envoy finally reaches them, equipped with a heavy oaken table, and the negotiations begin. Radovid has sent mostly minor nobles, with one prince who Jaskier suspects of being an uncle or father-in-law. None of them seem to recognize Jaskier, and he doesn’t feel the need to introduce himself by his real name, but he can feel the shift in their interest as he points out words with hidden meanings in Redanian law, holds his silverwear correctly at dinner, and displays more than a casual knowledge of the nobles they’re trying to make sure remain titled.

Nothing happens that first day, and as night falls Jaskier returns to the White Wolf’s tent. Geralt comes out of the flap to meet him and seizes him as soon as he’s within reaching distance. There’s no expression on his face to bely anything but stony calm, but in his arms Jaskier can feel some deep-rooted tension seep out of his body, like he’s been winding tighter and tighter every second since the negotiation party left. Jaskier tilts his head back and draws Geralt’s face down against his neck, the way he knows he likes. Geralt makes a low, contented sound.

“It’s alright,” Jaskier tells him. “We’ve got it well in-hand.”

“I know you do, lark,” Geralt says, and carries him back inside.

Jaskier’s never had a relationship that requires so few words; not at the Lettenhove estate and not at Oxenfurt and not at Swann’s Neck. It’s not that he and Geralt don’t talk—they talk when there’s something that needs to be said, and Jaskier never feels like there’s anything he _can’t_ say. But there’s no call, with his mate, for the sort of deceptive circles that Jaskier dances round everyone else, no call for careful platitudes, small talk, for the runaway way Jaskier babbles when he wants to cover up how nervous or excited or depressed he is.

So, the treaty negotiation is a good outlet.

At least, it is until they arrive on the third day. Jaskier noticed that there was some sort of maneuvering going on behind the scenes the day before, and he knows he wasn’t the only one, but really, he hadn’t expected anything like _this_.

Sitting across the table, with the Redanian delegation, is his mother.

The Redanians must keep her out of sight until they’re nearly upon them, because Jaskier didn’t see her on approach—might not have gotten this far, if he had—but now here she is, hands folded in her lap, face a little more lined than he remembers but no more beautiful for it, sitting between the prince and a marquis from the coastal regions and very studiously avoiding looking at him.

Jaskier stops dead in his tracks. Yennefer, ahead of him, doesn’t notice anything amiss, taking her seat on the White Wolf’s side of the table, but behind him, Aubry and Eskel let out defensive growls. “Bard,” Eskel says. They must smell it on him, whatever emotion he’s feeling, even though he can’t identify it himself; a potent mix of anger and sadness and loss and love. Even now, love.

Jaskier schools his expression, tries to shake it off. “Nothing,” he tells Eskel, and takes his seat next to Yennefer at the table.

He faltered for barely a second, but still, the Redanian prince is watching him with a smug, snakelike smile on his face. Jaskier knows he’s not the only one noticing _that_ , either, judging by the way Eskel and Aubry sit with their hands on the hilts of their swords for the entire negotiation, but he tries to ignore it all—the protective witchers, the middle-aged prince looking like the cat who got the canary, his mother sitting across the table, silent, not contributing, called for from the verdant and fragrant halls of the Lettenhove estate merely to get at her youngest son.

They break for dinner, today, and when they do, Jaskier shakes his tail and goes to find his mother. It may not be the wisest course of action, given his family history, but he feels, nonsensically, that if he can speak to her away from everything else, away from the trappings of nobility, away from his father, she’ll reveal to him some sort of hidden, abiding love.

She’s standing far away from the rest of the Redanian party, on the crest of a hill. Her hands are clasped in front of her. A soft breeze rustles a lock of her hair, gone gray now with age, but she doesn’t move to fix it, holding herself as if she’s a glass figurine, something which, when jostled too much, might break. Even from behind, Jaskier can tell that she hears his footsteps, the dry grass crunching under his boots; the delicate muscles at the back of her neck tense. “Julian,” she says.

“Mother,” he replies, and watches the muscles in her neck jump again, even as she still refuses to look at him. Whatever small part of him had still been hopeful is speared by that tiny, involuntary motion, that _flinch_. He swallows. “Look at me.”

She does.

Jaskier’s not sure what he expected. Red-ringed eyes, or a look of deep regret. All there is is an unfeeling mask, a perfect image of unshakable nobility.

It fills him with a sudden, boiling rush of anger. He’d been planning to ask her how she was, how the family was, if his father was still alive, but instead he says in a thin, broken voice, “I was your _son_.” Just that truth shouldn’t be enough to hurt her, but it is. She flinches. “I was your son, and you sold me.”

“You understand how it is, Julian,” she says, after a moment, “with male omegas—”

“No,” he snaps. “No, fuck you, I do _not_ understand how it is. The unchangeable fact of my biology should never have prevented you from loving me. It certainly doesn’t stop the White Wolf.”

He turns to go, not wanting to waste another second on her, on his family, on fucking _Redania_ , on these people who see no value to a human life except transaction, but after a few steps he thinks of something else. “The mercenaries you sent to Ard Carraigh. Why did you tell them to kill me? I was no use to you dead.”

His mother touches the back of her hand to her mouth delicately, like she always used to when his brothers were discussing something untoward at the supper table. “Your father found a surgeon. All we needed was your soulmark.”

The blood drains out of Jaskier’s body. “You were going to put my mark on someone else?”

His mother nods wordlessly.

Jaskier stumbles back down the hill. He has no idea where he’s going, but his feet must carry him back to their camp anyways, because the next thing he knows he’s being rushed by two very concerned looking witchers and a sorceress with violet eyes, eased to the ground and fed water from a skin. “I’m alright,” he says, when he has the mind to say anything. No one’s asked, but he feels he needs to say anyways. “I’ll be fine, I can get through the negotiation.”

“Fucking hell, Jaskier, we’re not worried about the negotiation,” Yennefer snaps. Her tone of voice would be terrifying, if it were directed at him, but it’s not; it’s directed at whatever’s left him in this state. “What happened?”

“Who is that woman?” Eskel cuts in.

Always so astute, Eskel.

Jaskier laughs, drops his head in his hands, contemplates briefly the wisdom of pulling his own hair out. “She’s my mother.”

“And that would be the same mother who sold you for a gold coin?”

Jaskier looks up at Eskel, suddenly exhausted. The scarred witcher looks like he’s about three seconds from laying waste to the Redanian camp, peace treaty be damned, until Yennefer stands, puts a hand on his shoulder, and murmurs something Jaskier can’t hear in his ear. Eskel’s jaw tenses, but he nods and drops his hand from his sword. Yen gives Jaskier a hand up from the ground.

“Ready to get back in there?” she asks bracingly.

“Lead the way,” Jaskier says.

Yennefer gives him a smile kinder than he thought her capable of, squeezes his arm, and heads back for the negotiating table.

Jaskier lets her do most of the talking that afternoon. He focuses, mostly, on not falling apart. He breathes and digs his fingernails into his thigh, grounded by the tiny points of pain, feels the spring sun warm on his face and the presence of Eskel unwavering at his side, feels, just slightly, the tender twist of his knife scar every time he inhales, the months-old reminder of the wound that should have robbed him of the one good thing in his life. He feels his boots on the ground, the fine upholstery of the chair and the faint touch of the wind in his hair, hears the cadence of voices but doesn’t hear what’s being said, telling himself over and over, _Quiet the mind. Live in the body_.

When the sun set and negotiations have concluded for the day, Jaskier waits until they’re out of sight of the Redanian envoy and grabs Yennefer’s arm. His grip is probably tight enough to be bruising, but she only gives him a short, alarmed look and reads exactly what he’s asking.

There’s a tearing sound, and one of her portals appears. Jaskier chokes out some terribly unbecoming profession of thanks, and steps into Geralt’s tent.

Geralt’s not here.

 _No matter,_ Jaskier tells himself. _No matter,_ and tries to collapse into Geralt’s bed. He doesn’t quite make it, and instead finds himself sat on the grassy ground, leaning hard against the side of the field cot, but he buries his face in the furs, and they smell like his alpha, so he figures that’s just as well.

It’s only when the fur against his skin turns wet that he realizes he’s crying. Great, gasping sobs so violent he can hardly draw breath between them, and he’s making a lot of very undignified noise, so he tries to close his mouth, but—oh, gods, it’s all coming up at once, years of it, a lifetime’s worth, his family’s hatred and his lonely nights and how his bedmates at Oxenfurt used to say _rare bird_ like he was something to be bought and kept in a cage; that night, drugged and slung over the back of a horse and too weak to lift his own head while his father said _moans like a fucking whore_ , the first time a slaver stripped him naked and checked his teeth, months in the back of that cart, how he could feel the song bleeding out of his heart, the relief of standing on an auction block and not being wanted; that little girl’s gaze like a dead tree; his own gaze in a broken looking glass, blood dried thick and sticky on the backs of his thighs, the red-faced shame of being torn in that place that was only ever supposed to be touched with love; standing outside a music shop window in Ard Carraigh and looking at a lute and knowing it was a far too dangerous thing to hope; the knife sliding between his ribs, staring down at the wolf on his chest, knowing he was _so close._ So close.

And Geralt’s not here.

—

But then he is.

Jaskier doesn’t notice him enter, through the haze of his own tears, but one moment he’s clutching the furs and feeling bereft, and the next he’s tucked against a warm chest, being rocked gently, and he recognizes his mate’s touch. He holds tight to Geralt’s arm and lets himself be soothed, lets Geralt’s soft murmuring and the pressure of his lips on his forehead bring him slowly, slowly back to himself.

Geralt leans back against the bed, Jaskier cradled against his front, their legs stretched out in a tangle. His silver-white hair tickles Jaskier’s nose, moves with his exhalations as he breathes like he’s coming down from a night terror. The White Wolf’s whole body is angled around Jaskier like a shield, and sitting there like that, nose stuffed with snot, eyes throbbing, lungs full of that clean, purged feeling that he always used to get after a good cry when he was a child, Jaskier feels safer than he’s ever felt. More loved, more protected, more _cherished_ , with Geralt’s fingers moving absently through his hair, than he’s ever felt.

“What happened?” Geralt asks, after a time.

Jaskier turns his face into Geralt’s chest. If the witcher minds that he’s wiping snot on his armor, he doesn’t say. “They trotted my mother out, trying to get to me. I suppose it worked.”

“Hm.” Geralt sounds angry, concerned, tight.

“She told me,” Jaskier continues, “that the mercenary that almost killed me was there to cut off my soulmark. They were going to sew it on someone else.”

Geralt kisses his forehead. “I would have known.”

“Redanian surgeons are very good—”

“Little bird,” Geralt cuts him off, gentle but in a tone that brooks no argument, “I would have known.”

Jaskier _hm_ s and presses his face against Geralt’s neck.

He supposes, if someone had come to him wearing his mark who wasn’t Geralt, he would have known, too. Maybe not on account of his witcher senses or his innate alpha ability to smell his omega, but he would have known.

Geralt turns Jaskier in his arms, so they’re face to face, and kisses him. Jaskier gives as good as he gets, moving to straddle Geralt’s lap, settled down across the wide span of his thighs, fingers curling in long white hair. He makes a breathy, happy sound against Geralt’s lips, and feels Geralt’s answering rumble in his toes, in his hips, in his heart. The witcher pulls away to dust feather-light kisses across Jaskier’s cheeks, cleaning up the dried, salty remnants of his tears with gentle touches of tongue, and Jaskier feels a swell of love so overwhelming that he starts crying again.

Geralt kisses those tears, too.

—

His first heat at Kaer Morhen comes in the early days of summer.

Geralt smells it before Jaskier even starts to feel the itch. He pulls Jaskier into his lap at the high table after a performance of _The Song of the White Wolf_ , while the whole hall is still roaring in applause, buries his nose in Jaskier’s neck, and inhales. “Your heat is on the way,” he says, too low for anyone else to hear.

A thrill of—anticipation? nervousness?—runs through Jaskier like a shot. “I suppose every witcher in the whole kaer can smell it on me?”

“Probably,” Geralt agrees. “Don’t worry. They know you’re mine.”

Witchers, as it turns out—or possibly just Jaskier’s witcher—are very attentive alphas. Over the next few days, Geralt is always close at hand, attending to his correspondence next door while Jaskier coaches Eskel to pronounce vowels correctly in Nilfgaardian, plastered to Jaskier’s side when he slips down to the hot springs for a wash, watching from the high outer wall of the fortress as Jaskier and Lambert teach Ciri to sled. It gets to be so much that Jaskier storms out of his chambers, the ones he only ever uses for composing, and interrupts Geralt in the middle of the war council he’s holding in the hall. Vesemir and Eskel flee; Jaskier puts his hands on his hips.

“Geralt. I need you to stop smothering me.”

A flash of hurt crosses Geralt’s face, like the great lout doesn’t even know what he’s _done_ , and almost instantly Jaskier feels like a monster. This man has done nothing but love him, and here he is, acting ungrateful; but really, this isn’t something he’s willing to let fester.

Geralt speaks carefully, in a tone that suggests each word pains him. “If you don’t want me there for your heat, we can…figure something out. Build you a heat room, like the one at Swann’s Neck. I’ll never touch you when you don’t want me to. But please don’t ask me to be far away. I don’t think I can.”

It’s the most words Jaskier’s ever heard Geralt speak at once. For a moment, that fact blocks Jaskier from actually registering what Geralt’s said, but when he does the floor drops out of his stomach. He steps forward and seizes his mate furiously by the shirt. “I want you there, Geralt. I want you to touch me _everywhere_. And I will come to you straight away when my heat actually _starts_ , but right now all you’re doing is lurking while I try to come up with something to rhyme with ‘silver,’ and it’s driving me out of my skull.”

Geralt covers Jaskier’s hands with his, an amused crinkle at the corners of his eyes. “I guess I’ll see you then, lark.”

He drops a quick, familiar kiss on Jaskier’s head, and departs.

A day later, when Jaskier actually _does_ start to notice his heat, nearly a week behind the witcher, he skips supper and goes straight to Geralt’s chambers, which are really _his_ and Geralt’s chambers, positions himself against the headboard, and waits.

Supper seems like it’s taking _ages_. And waiting starts to get sort of…hot. Jaskier shifts on the bed, unable to get comfortable, and then realizes that the reason he can’t get comfortable is the massive erection trapped inside his trousers, and starts to strip. He doesn’t want to get up, not when the bed smells like Geralt and his limbs feel like jelly, so he flops around a while and manages to kick off his trousers, the first touch of cool air between the cheeks of his buttocks nearly orgasmic, manages to unbutton his doublet far enough to be able to pull it over his head. He feels like a mess already, the hair on his chest and legs rubbed every which way, the hair on his head even worse, but he can’t find it in him to do anything but flops back on the pillows and bury his nose in his mate’s scent and _whine_.

It’s pathetic, and embarrassing. Jaskier wishes the bedside table weren’t so far away, so he could reach the oil and shove his own fingers up his arse, but it’s very, _very_ far away, and anyways _his_ fingers aren’t what he wants at all.

After an interminable period of time that could be anything from a hundred to a million years, the bed dips and Geralt gathers Jaskier up in his arms. He’s naked already, and Jaskier can feel the swollen, insistent heat of his cock against the back of his thigh. Even just that is so good he could _weep,_ which is appalling, and lovely. He presses back against Geralt, rolls over and mashes his face to Geralt’s bare chest, not sure what he wants or what he’s trying to do but knowing that he needs to feel closer, as close as he can possibly get without crawling inside Geralt’s body.

“Lark,” his alpha rumbles affectionately. His hand sweeps up the superheated line of Jaskier’s back, cradles his head. “Tell me. Is there anything I need to know? Anything you don’t like?”

That Geralt still has the presence of mind to _ask,_ when Jaskier’s like this, when he smells like this, is huge in a way Jaskier doesn’t have the power to comprehend, right now. But he finds it in himself to answer: “The cold. I hate the cold.”

“You won’t be cold,” Geralt promises.

“I know.” Jaskier pulls back to look in his eyes, because suddenly it seems like the most important thing in the world. “I trust you.”

Geralt looks like he’s been blown open. He takes Jaskier’s face in his hands, draws him down, and kisses him. Jaskier moans and opens his mouth wide, sinking into him, wanting his witcher as deep inside him as he can get, in as many ways as he can get. Geralt shifts so he’s lying on top of Jaskier, the bedclothes rustling around them and the heavy, comfortable weight of him makes some wild emptiness in Jaskier’s chest settle down to rest. He bends his knees up on either side of Geralt’s hips, making a home for him in the cradle of his pelvis, and something in that, in the way he’s opening himself up, makes Geralt growl and grind down sharply, possessively against Jaskier’s cock. It’s very nearly enough to make him come, but Jaskier can never come during heat without somethinginside him.

He doesn’t have the patience for foreplay, right now. He feels like he’s been on the edge for hours already, waiting for his wolf to come back from the great hall, so he catches one of Geralt’s big hands and folds back all but two of his fingers, which he takes in his mouth and sucks on, the same way he sucks on Geralt’s cock, tasting the tang of sweat and the musk of a day’s work, running his tongue over the sword-hilt callouses and the blunt fingernails and the thick knuckles that he loves so dearly whenever they pop past the tight rim of his hole. Geralt makes a punched, lusty noise in response, and when Jaskier opens his mouth he moves his fingers, dripping with saliva, between Jaskier’s legs, wet and hot across the soft skin of his perineum, to his hole.

He presses one finger in, and the burning intrusion of it is so good that Jaskier bites down hard Geralt’s shoulder, grunting. Geralt gives him another finger almost immediately, knowing exactly how much Jaskier can take, and Jaskier’s thighs clench around his sides, spasmodic, helpless. Geralt crooks his fingers and hits that spot that makes all the nerve endings inside Jaskier light up, and he bites down even harder, tasting his alpha’s blood, until Geralt turns his lips into Jaskier’s hair and says, “Want to hear you, little bird.” Says, “Can you come like this?” Rubbing his fingers over and over that spot, the heel of his hand pressed against the place where Jaskier’s thighs start, like he’s holding him, and Jaskier pulls his mouth away from Geralt’s shoulder and makes a sound like he’s dying and _comes_.

Straight away, he wants more. Geralt pulls his hand out from between Jaskier’s legs, kissing his slack lips contendedly, and the feeling of emptiness is so sudden and overwhelming that Jaskier digs his nails into his sides, frantic, not wanting him to go anywhere, even if it _is_ only to reach over for the oil. “No,” he whines, “no, stay. Need you, Geralt.”

“Hm,” Geralt tells him, and stays. His golden eyes, half-hidden behind heavy lids, track down Jaskier’s body, to the mess of come between them, and he drags his fingers through it, gathering it up in his hand. He lifts his weight away from Jaskier just long enough to urge him to turn over with a gentle nudge, and then slides down and settles against the backs of his thighs, level with his arse.

“ _Geralt,”_ Jaskier begs, aching for something, he doesn’t know what.

Geralt, it seems, knows exactly what. He presses three fingers, sloppy with Jaskier’s own come, back inside him. The wet squelch of it is obscene, and so, so good, and just hearing it starts a fire inside Jaskier’s chest that spreads with terrifying swiftness to his whole body, to his hands clenched in the ruined bedsheets and his heart running sluggishly in his chest and the small of his back, pressed under the steady strength of Geralt’s forearm. The witcher holds him down so that he can’t seem to move anything below his waist, fucking his come-slicked fingers into Jaskier with deft little twists of his wrist, his whole body moving with the thrust of it, until Jaskier’s cock, soft and sticky between his stomach and the sheets, is painfully hard again. “Please,” Jaskier gasps into the pillows, “please, I need—”

 _Your cock_ , that sentence was going to end, but Geralt seems to know without words. His warm weight disappears from Jaskier’s back, and he must actually go to grab the oil this time, because when he’s back, Jaskier feels a drizzle of it, body-warmed, like Geralt rubbed it between his hands to get it ready, pool at the cleft of his crack. Geralt runs his fingers through it and shoves it past the loose mouth of his hole, and there’s so much of his own come, of the oil, inside him, that Jaskier feels full already. Or, at least, he thinks he does, until the blunt head of Geralt’s cock bumps against his hole, pressing, and slides easily inside. Jaskier’s mate drops his face between his shoulder blades, breathing hard through his open mouth, elbows braced on either side of Jaskier’s shoulders, and Jaskier turns his head to catch his mouth in a brief, wet kiss.

Geralt shoves the rest of the way into him, and Jaskier _keens_. All the air is gone from his chest, and he feels, nonsensically, like if he breathes too deep his lungs will hit Geralt’s cock and have to inflate around it. The thought is a good one, a comforting one, like his alpha is a part of him, and Jasker takes a deep breath, his back pressing flush to Geralt’s sweaty chest, and moves his hips in a way that he hopes says _move_. The witcher tilts his hips away, dragging his cock out of Jaskier’s arse with almost no resistance, then fucks back into him so hard Jaskier sees stars. He clutches the bedsheets and moans and _feels_ and tries to hold on while Geralt moves unerringly over top of him, dropping kisses on Jaskier’s shoulder blades, on the side of his jaw, on the ridges of his vertebrae. He’s quiet when he fucks, but Jaskier makes enough noise for both of them, writhing and trying, even trapped as he is, to shove back on the thick rod of Geralt’s cock, to grind forward and find some stimulation for his own weeping erection. Geralt must notice his strife, because a moment later there’s a big hand sliding under his stomach, and Geralt takes hold of his cock. All it takes is a single stroke, and Jaskier’s coming again, the pleasure of it so intense that it rips through his body like a yell.

Geralt gentles his lips to the back of Jaskier’s neck and strokes him through it, and mere moments later, his arse still clenching and unclenching wildly, Jaskier feels his alpha’s cock start to swell. He moans as the knot presses past the abused rim of his hole, rising and rising until it’s settled in against that most tender part of him, throbbing in a steady rhythm that’s so good Jaskier thinks he might die.

The weight disappears from his back again as Geralt moves to lie behind him, pulling him flush against his chest. Jaskier’s heartbeat settles down.

Still inside him, Geralt pulls the bedclothes and the furs up around them, protective, sheltering. “Thank you,” he rumbles, “for trusting me.”

“You’re mine,” Jaskier says back, still mostly out of it. “My wolf.”

“Hm,” Geralt agrees.

His hand settles, warm and sure, over the soulmark on Jaskier’s chest.

And Jaskier drifts, as far from cold as he’s ever been.


End file.
